in 2022, a near-identical reproduction by Sturtevant of a painting by
Frank Stella Sturtevant's earliest known paintings were made in New York in the late 1950s. In these works, she sliced tubes of paint open, flattened them, and attached them to canvas. Most of these works contain fragments from tubes of several colors of paint, some have additional pencil scribbles and daubs of paint. paintings and objects created by her contemporaries with results that can immediately be identified with an original, at a point that turned the concept of originality on its head. She initially focused on works by such American artists as Johns,
Roy Lichtenstein,
Frank Stella,
Claes Oldenburg,
James Rosenquist, and
Andy Warhol. Warhol gave Sturtevant one of his silkscreens so she could produce her own versions of his
Flowers paintings,
Warhol Flowers (1969–70). After a Johns flag painting that was a component of Rauschenberg's combine
Short Circuit was stolen, Rauschenberg commissioned Sturtevant to paint a reproduction, which was subsequently incorporated into the combine. In the late 1960s, Sturtevant concentrated on replicating works by
Joseph Beuys and
Marcel Duchamp. In a 1967 photograph, she and Rauschenberg pose as a nude
Adam and Eve, roles originally played by Duchamp and
Brogna Perlmutter in a 1924 picture shot by
Man Ray. In the early 1970s, Sturtevant stopped exhibiting art for more than 10 years. Pushback on her conceptual practice had begun, in fact, with Oldenburg and his dealer,
Leo Castelli, being publicly upset at her restaging of Oldenburg's
The Store (1961) as
The Store of Claes Oldenburg in 1967, just a few blocks away from where the original had been staged. As critic Eleanor Heartney wrote, "Sturtevant found her work met with resistance and even hostility. Her frustration culminated with a 1973 show at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. Titled “Sturtevant: Studies done for Beuys’ Action and objects, Duchamps’ etc. Including film,” the exhibition encompassed three rooms of objects and three of her early films that played off Warhol, Beuys and Duchamp. It was met with a deafening silence from the art world, precipitating her withdrawal." From the early 1980s she focused on the next generation of artists, including
Robert Gober,
Anselm Kiefer,
Paul McCarthy, and
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She mastered painting, sculpture, photography and film in order to produce a full range of copies of the works of her chosen artists. In most cases, her decision to start copying an artist happened before those artists achieved broader recognition. Nearly all of the artists she chose to copy are today considered iconic for their time or style. This has given rise to discussions among art critics on how it had been possible for Sturtevant to identify those artists at such an early stage. In 1991, Sturtevant presented an entire show consisting of her repetition of Warhol's
Flowers series. Her later works mainly focus on reproductions in the digital age. Sturtevant commented on her work at her 2012 retrospective
Sturtevant: Image over Image at the
Moderna Museet: "What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine—that's the way to go." After feeling misunderstood by critics and artists, Sturtevant stopped making art for a decade. Her 2014 exhibition at
MoMA was the first significant exhibition in the US in decades. Her last large-scale installation,
The House of Horrors, has been on temporary display at the
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris since June 2015. "In some ways, style is her
medium. She was the first
postmodern artist—before the fact—and also the last", according to Peter Eleey, curator of her 2014 MoMA exhibition. ==Later life==